Vietnamese Vegetarian Author Uyen Luu On Cooking

We are not vegetarians, but I have been brought up to love my vegetables. Growing up, my mum featured all our meals around herbs, fruits, and vegetables. We will have fried fish because tomatoes are in season, along with tofu and grilled eggplant. In a meal, we would have about three or four vegetarian dishes and one protein dish, shared together with rice.

Family meals or eating together is hugely paramount in the Vietnamese culture. Casual talk about the food you’ve enjoyed or about to delight in is popular chit-chat. That small talk embarks on all sorts of meaning and affiliations as true feelings are rarely spoken.

My mum sings when she talks about food. Fruit and vegetables make her very excited and you can tell her level of happiness by the way she cooks, eats, and talks about food. The intonations of the Vietnamese language convey as much meaning, spirit, and emotion as the words, and so my mother's excited yells also chirped about steaming purple sweet potatoes, and shrieked about fragrant, juicy limes in dipping sauces, as if every season presents her with a new surprise or a memory of a good thing coming back to life.

‘My neighbor told me that Chinese violets are in season,’ she would whisper, ‘they are really great for a good night's sleep’, as if the secret violets would sell out, if she spoke any louder. ‘I have found some,’ she would say in a more daring voice. ‘Shall I make a soup or shall I fry it with garlic?’ In the next triumphant breath, she pulls a green, almost yellowing mango out of her shopping bag and breathes it in. ‘This is a gift for Olive [my daughter]. Smell it, go on, smell it....’ Victorious, she would chant, ‘Ngon quá trời ngon!’ (So delicious, heavenly delicious.)

My mum and her friends were the only Vietnamese people I knew growing up in London. All I know, I know by eavesdropping on their kitchen talk while they labored me on dumpling-folding duties and rolling spring rolls. They have been a sisterhood—a clan of women who support each other's wellbeing, sing karaoke, jiggle a dance together, share food, endlessly discuss recipes and techniques and natter about herbs, fruits, and vegetables—since the early 1980s. It's as if the plants in which they speak reflect the sweetness of life, the sourness it brings, the bitterness it embeds and the spiciness it embraces. The beauty and deliciousness of their dishes mirror the compassion and affection that are often suppressed inside them.

Unsurprisingly, my mum's life revolves around food. The conversation only ever starts with, ‘Have you eaten yet?’ To cook well is to exhibit your love, kindness, friendship and compassion that you express through the colors, the flavors, and the vibrancy in your cooking.

The secret to good Vietnamese cooking is: the herbs and vegetables that elevate a dish. The perfect balance of contrasting sweet, sour, hot, umami, and bitter flavors harmonises with different textures and temperatures. This is what makes Vietnamese a brilliant cuisine and one of the most delicious. Whilst, the color entices, and brings joy and pleasure.

Imagine the exhilaration when my mum first found coriander (cilantro) in London; they threw a carpet picnic of summer rolls and celebrated with full mic karaoke, volume 11. And when a friend discovered that they sold fresh pandan leaves in Chinatown, they threw everyone's birthday parties. And when supermarkets started to stock honeyed mango and green papaya, the parties got more and more elaborate.

Having grown up in Britain, I was often torn between the two sides of my identity. One which was rich with steamed pandan-flavored desserts and one with paper bags of battered haddock and salty, vinegary soggy chips (French fries). Never knowing if I was Vietnamese or British or how to combine the two, I resented my mother's cooking as a teenager because it was not what everyone else was eating. But at the same time, how I loved it.

Never knowing if I was Vietnamese or British or how to combine the two, I resented my mother's cooking as a teenager because it was not what everyone else was eating. But at the same time, how I loved it.

In the urbanscape of damp and drizzly Hackney, the smells of star anise and black cardamon lingered two streets down, and a bowl of steaming-hot, delicious noodles greeted me home. She tore the leaves of Thai basil onto my phở which transformed the charred onion and ginger broth to another level. She squeezed every last drop of the first fresh lime she got hold of since we left Vietnam. The exquisite scent brought back homesick memories of my grandmothers and aunties who would often serve me ice-cold lime sodas with strawberry syrup. They even rubbed their hands and conditioned their hair with the leftover rind of limes. Nothing ever went to waste.

On busier days when she had too much to do, I would smell that delicious, buttery, garlicky egg-fried rice, peppered with golden sweetcorn and green peas, using up leftover rice and freezer goods. It is the flavor of home and the flavor of her love.

On weekends when my friends came for sleepovers or if it was my birthday party, a bounty of crispy and perfectly uniform spring rolls and bright yellow coconut crêpes lined a buffet. My childhood memories are filled with the glorious food my mother made, and as a cook, I am constantly wanting to achieve the characteristics of her cooking—a mix of instinct and practise; often fast, frugal and perfectly balanced. I have used her principles to write recipes in my new book, Vietnamese Vegetarian, which adapts many of my favorite Vietnamese dishes to vegetarian and layering on flavor after flavor as my mother has always taught me to do. It was always her food which helped me to find my way through the weathers of life and my path back home.

Excerpted with permission from Vietnamese Vegetarian by Uyen Luu, published by Hardie Grant, May 2023.